The Nicole Sandler Show

Today has been one of those days when everything that could go wrong did. I'm finally posting this at 7pm because I had to fix the audio which was fubar on today's show. It seems the gremlins that I banished have come back. So I fixed today's show as much as I could, but I still must fix my studio so we'll have a show tomorrow. But do have a listen as Driftglass was excellent as usual. And of course, there was that Kash Patel bestiality discussion near the end. No, I'm not kidding. It's even in the Congressional Record. This regime is so classy... or not!

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Today's the day David Corn's new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, hits stores — and he joins me to make the case that this isn't the "Russia hoax," it's the Russia hoax hoax. We trace ten years of Russian interference in our elections that never actually stopped, the bipartisan Senate report (signed by Marco Rubio!) that already proved it, and the Trump Jr. wedding bankrolled by a Russian oligarch just weeks before Russia started meddling in the midterms again. Also on today's show: my ongoing health mess, the Anthropic researcher who quit over AI safety fears, and sound from today's Kash Patel Senate hearing.

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I'm back from vacation and diving straight into the deep end. Fifty days until Election Day — vote early, vote smart, and don't trust the mail with your ballot if you can hand-deliver it instead. I cover Trump's unhinged Labor Day meltdown, the $40 trillion debt milestone, No Kings rallies coming back on October 17th, and the ongoing Jimmy Kimmel/FCC saga. Then I do something I never thought I'd do again: play a Bill Maher clip I agree with, on a topic I know will make some of you furious with me. Fair warning, and please actually listen before you yell.

Dr. Art Jipson (University of Dayton) joins for a wide-ranging conversation about the national nightmare we're living through — rising antisemitism, the difference between explaining extremism and excusing it, and why treating people we disagree with as enemies is corroding our politics. We close things out talking music: the Alan Parsons Project's stunning 50th anniversary tour and an underrated songwriter named Chris Isaak and the god Todd Rundgren.

This week on the show: David Corn (Mother Jones, "How Russia Won") tomorrow, Jonathan Kaufman ("When America Roared") Thursday, and a special recorded conversation with musician and author Warren Zanes airing next Wednesday — Bruce Springsteen's 76th birthday.

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I'm on vacation this week, but dropping in a special show to commemorate 9-11, twenty-five years later with some personal remembrances, along with a song and a book! The book by Jim DeFede, "The Day the World Came to Towwn," is available at https://bookshop.org/a/1630/978006300.... I think you'll recognize the song by Five for Fighting, "Superman (It's Not Easy)". I'll be back Monday with all new shows...

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I apologize for the late arrival of this podcast, but my right hand is in severe pain which makes it very difficult to type. So, here it is. but this week the show will have to speak for itself!

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I awoke this morning after very little sleep due to extreme pain in my right hand thinking I'd take the day off when I learned that Gloria Steinem had died. So much for the idea of resting my ailing hand todaaay!

I called Amy Simon — Playwright & actress, cultural HERstorian, and author of the upcoming book"American Agitators: Five Centuries of Unstoppable Women Who Fought for Social and Political Justice" — because if anyone was going to help me do Gloria justice, it was her. Amy's been fortunate enough to have met her and even performed for her, and wrote about her for the book, No wonder she's able to go deep, talking about the Playboy Bunny exposé that launched her career, the founding of Ms. Magazine, her friendships with Dolores Huerta and Wilma Mankiller, what she gave up and endured to say what she said, and why a whole generation of young women today doesn't know her name — and needs to.

We end the episode with Gloria's own voice: her full speech from the 2017 Women's March on Washington.

Tomorrow, Marcy Wheeler joins me to wrap the week. Monday is Labor Day, and I might actually take some time off after that — we'll see what my hand says.

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Driftglass returns for our weekly check-in, and things go sideways fast — straight into the Supreme Court's bunker-ballroom ruling, the "court packing" talking point, and why Trump's first-ever mid-cycle party convention in Dallas has vulnerable Republicans bolting for the exits ahead of the midterms. We also dig into Texas closing more than 100 polling places in a county that's trending blue, and reports of a Postal Service whistleblower on mail ballots.

Then Jason Leopold — the FOIA King himself — joins to walk through his year-long fight to get answers on why Ghislaine Maxwell was quietly moved to a lower-security prison after her interview with Todd Blanche. What he got back after suing the government: one page, almost entirely redacted in white space. We also cover Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's floor remarks on the suppressed FBI 302s naming Trump, and Rep. Thomas Massie reading 14 names connected to the Epstein network into the Congressional Record.

And yes, there is a comedy bit about "Mustang Meat" that I want to be very clear I do not endorse. But I'll admit that I did laugh.

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I crashed Brad Friedman's vacation. Again. I've done it before, but only because it's difficult to get him on my show when he's knee deep in recording his own show each day. So I take him when I can get him.

Brad — from BradBlog and the Bradcast, one of the people I actually call a friend after twenty-plus years in this business — was supposed to be off the grid this week. Instead he's on my show telling me his theory that November is going to be a bigger wave for Democrats than anyone's predicting, and I'm telling him why I don't quite believe him yet.

Along the way: the ten-year anniversary of my cancer surgery coming 10 years after the orange mess entered politics (he did not steal credit for saving my life, no matter what Brad heard secondhand), a possible tropical storm bearing down on Los Angeles, a scorpion in my house, the FCC coming for broadcasters who tell the truth, and the actual story of how Brad and I met back when I was hosting mornings in Miami and he was just some guy with a blog who actually knew what he was talking about.

We also get into the weird coincidence of Air America radio going dark the exact same day the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United — and why I will personally hunt down the woman who got my old KPFK show canceled. (No, I won't. I can't even remember her name. But karma will get her...)

Honest, unscripted, occasionally profane, always independent. That's the show.

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I started the show recounting my ongoing beef with T-Mobile - a diversion from what I'm really mad about. Yesterday marked my 10th anniversary of being cancer-free, but I realized that this gift of 10 extra years was made up of a demented madman hell-bent on destroying everything good about this country. That's what this past decade has been, and I'm realized that it's affecting me in pretty awful way, when I should be celebrating.

Dr. Art Jipson returns for the back-to-school check-in, bringing surprising optimism from his students, before we dug into military mismanagement, press intimidation, food safety rollbacks, and whether people can actually be pulled back from extremism. Plus, a replay of my Thursday phone call to a random Canadian named Jeffrey Sandler, in the name of international diplomacy.

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It's Friday, so it's Emptywheel Friday with Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net — and for the first Friday in a few weeks, no technical gremlins. We dig into Trump's plan to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America," his failing tariff strategy against Canada, Mexico, and Iran, and whether he can even walk down a staircase reliably anymore. Marcy breaks down the strange Ratcliffe trip to Putin, why Russia has good reason to think the U.S. is weak, and the human cost of Pete Hegseth's Pentagon: a 19-year-old sailor punished for jumping ship after 8.5 months at sea without touching land. We also get into the manufactured Hakeem Jeffries/Jared Kushner "controversy," Ashley Moody's corruption problems in Florida, the collapsing Minnesota "Antifa" prosecutions, and our thoughts as we bid farewell to Dolly Parton.

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